Drug Rehab Reading: Five Inspiring Memoirs

Empowering Yourself with a Drug Rehab Reading List

Part of successfully making it through Palm Valley drug rehab is knowing that you’re not alone. Millions of people before you, and millions of people after you have and will go through drug rehab for a drug or alcohol addiction. The 5 books chosen for drug rehab reading represent men and women who were there, in your shoes, struggling with drug or alcohol addiction. Their experiences are powerful and enlightening, and reading their inspiring stories might be exactly you need to make your time at drug rehab empowering, successful, and relapse-free.

1. Drinking: A Love Story, by Caroline Knapp
Overview: Fifteen million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism. Five million of them are women. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, started in their early teens and began to use alcohol as “liquid armor,” a way to protect themselves against the difficult realities of life. In this extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Knapp offers important insights not only about alcoholism but about life itself and how we learn to cope with it.

2. Parched, by Heather King
Overview: One woman’s journey to the bottom of the bottle and back again. In this moving, emotionally charged, and unflinching look at alcoholism and its effects, lawyer and prominent National Public Radio writer and commentator Heather King describes her twenty-year-long descent into the depths of addiction with wit and candor. King went from a highly functioning alcoholic who managed to maintain her grip on reality to living in the lowest of dive bars, drinking around the clock and barely sustaining an existence. With help from the most unexpected source, King stopped her self-destructive spiral and changed her world for the better. This is the poignant, painfully honest, and inspirational true story of a woman who looked into the abyss and was able to step back from the edge and reclaim her life on her own terms.

3. Lit, by Mary Karr
Overview: Lit follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner’s descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness–and to her astonishing resurrection. Karr’s longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood poet produces a son they adore. But she can’t outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in ‘The Mental Marriott,’ with an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her to the possibility of joy and leads her to an unlikely faith. Not since Saint Augustine cried, ‘Give me chastity, Lord-but not yet!’ has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity. Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober, becoming a mother by letting go of a mother, learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr’s relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up–as only Mary Karr can tell it.

4. The Night of the Gun, by David Carr
Overview: “In one sense, my story is a common one, a white boy misdemeanant who lands in a ditch and is restored to sanity through the love of his family, a God of his understanding and a support group that will go unnamed. But if the whole truth is told, it does not end there. “The book will be fundamentally different than a tell-all, or more commonly, tell-most. It will be a rigorously clear-eyed reported memoir in which the process of discovery will be part of the narrative motor…For instance, my brother asked if I was going to give him credit for bailing me out after I was arrested for possession of pot as an 18-yr.-old in a Wisconsin state park. I had not even remembered the incident. “You remember the story you can live with, not the one that happened.”

5. Dry, by Augusten Burroughs
Overview: You may not know it, but you’ve met Augusten Burroughs. You’ve seen him on the street, in bars, on the subway, at restaurants: a twentysomething guy, nice suit, works in advertising. Regular. Ordinary. But when the ordinary person had two drinks, Augusten was circling the drain by having twelve; when the ordinary person went home at midnight, Augusten never went home at all. Loud, distracting ties, automated wake-up calls and cologne on the tongue could only hide so much for so long. At the request (well, it wasn’t really a request) of his employers, Augusten lands in drug rehab, where his dreams of group therapy with Robert Downey Jr. are immediately dashed by the grim reality of fluorescent lighting and paper hospital slippers. But when Augusten is forced to examine himself, something actually starts to click and that’s when he finds himself in the worst trouble of all. Because when his thirty days are up, he has to return to his same drunken Manhattan life—and live it sober. What follows is a memoir for drug rehab reading that’s as moving as it is funny, as heartbreaking as it is true. Dry is the story of love, loss, and Starbucks as a Higher Power.

Ready for Your Own Drug Rehab Experience?

If you’re ready for your own drug rehab experience, contact Beaches Recovery for help. We create drug rehab programs that are intended to meet your specific needs. 

A professional drug rehab like Beaches Recovery in Jacksonville, Florida (FL) will be instrumental in your success, help you ward off relapse, and inspire you to change your life for the better. We celebrate a success story daily and our next one will be you! The following drug rehab treatment programs will address the negative behaviors and attitudes that may have spawned your addiction:

• Residential drug rehab in FL
• Partial hospitalization program (PHP)
• Outpatient drug rehab center in Jacksonville
• Men’s and women’s drug rehab
• Dual diagnosis treatment in FL

Don’t live another day in the clutches of drug and alcohol addiction. We can help, call 866.605.0532 today!